March 24, 2015; National Public Radio, “Shots”
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a report on Tuesday, March 24th, that indicated male nurses outearn female nurses by approximately $11,000 per year. According to the study, only about half of that gap is attributable to factors like education, work experience and clinical specialty, and that leaves a $5,148 salary gap. This is the case even though females outnumber males in the nursing profession by more than 10 to 1. In fact, men made up only about nine percent of registered nurses in 2011. Even more surprising—men were not permitted in nursing programs at some schools until the 1980s. The largest disparity is among nurse anesthetists, where men make more than $17,000 more than women.
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This 91.1 cent on the dollar disparity is less than in the general workforce, where women make 78.8 cents on the male dollar and is actually on par with another female-dominated profession, teaching. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, women teaching in elementary and middle schools earned 91.4 cents to every dollar earned by men. In secondary schools, female teachers earned 92.9 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Julie Rovner writes for NPR’s “Shots” blog that “the study analyzed data from the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, which ended in 2008, as well as from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2001 to 2013.” According to the Journal of Nursing, the number of nurses in the United States “decreased from 2,669,603 in the year 2000 to 2,262,020 in 2001.” One of the strategies to increase the number of nurses has been to recruit more men into the profession.
As a side note, Tuesday, April 14th, is Equal Pay Day. The chosen date serves as a symbol of how far into 2015 women must work to earn what men earned in 2014. It was “originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) as a public awareness even to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages.” More information can be found on the Equal Pay Day website. –Erin Lamb
